A style featuring bold distortions of natural shapes and colors that results in brilliantly colored abstractions from life; associated with the early work of Henri Matisse and the group known as the Fauves (French for "wild beasts") around the year 1905.
analytic cubism
The stage of cubism, especially as practiced by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque from approximately 1909 to 1912, wherein objects are geometrized and abstracted from life, taken apart or "analyzed," and then creatively reassembled according to the artist's personal conception.
synthetic cubism
The style of cubism developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque after 1912 in which the fractured, highly abstract forms of analytic cubism are reconstituted into synthetic wholes that are clearly recognizable as figures, still lifes, and so forth. This final stage of cubism features flat, loosely geometric figures against a shallow background.
futurism
A movement in art arising in Italy in the years before World War I. Futurists sought to communicate the dynamism, power, and glory of the new urban industrial "machine" world. Employing the general forms of analytic cubism, futurist painters, sculptors, and photographers imbued their abstractions of city scenes and mechanical experiences with a sense of dynamic movement and energy.
constructivism
The approach to art developed by Russian avant-garde sculptors, painters, and graphic artists (for example, Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, El Lissitzky) in the late 1910s and early 1920s. These artists worked in a largely nonrepresentational style featuring freely arranged geometric forms; often referred to as "Russian constructivism."
De Stijl
Dutch for "the style"; a movement in the fine and applied arts that originated in neutral Holland during the period of World War I, led by Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian. It is characterized by dynamically asymmetric compositions created from simple geometric shapes painted in flat colors.
dada
The anarchic international movement in art and culture, lasting from approximately 1914 to 1920, that arose largely in response to World War I. Derived from a nonsense word, dada stood for freedom, nonrational creativity, and rebellious nonconformity. Two types of dada artists stand out: those (for example, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray) who focused on intellectual and aesthetic issues, and those (for example, Hannah Höch and John Heartfield) who emphasized social and political content.
